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\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSEPTEMBER NOTEBOOK (2017)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n\nNo Black Hair Mountain.\n\nNo change of clothes.\n\nNo young girl named Double.\n\nNo friend from whom I\u2019ve stolen poems.\n\nNo horse sent back with money in its saddle.\n\nNo house named \u201cDeath Barrier.\u201d\n\nNo \u201clife-taking stones.\u201d\n\nNo mirrors, no meter.\n\nNo feet, no sneakers.\n\nNo people, no plants, no heat, no speaker.\n\nUnlike Bash\u014d, my home\u2019s no future.\n\n*\n\nA metaphor that is only partially ruined, partially consistent.\n\nPink essay.\n\n*\n\nI thought of what Carly had said about certain metaphors being ugly; certain\nmetaphors cannot be repaired. Still, I wonder what it might take to \u201crepair\u201d any metaphor.\n\n*\n\nThe postcard was invited to the sea.\n\nThe river sent the postcard to the sea.\n\nThe river wrote on the sea as if it were a postcard.\n\nThe river that was our intern.\n\n*\n\n\u201cWhat happens to the intern?\u201d Colby said.\n\n*\n\nI\u2019ve been an intern more times than I care to admit. Auden tells us what happens to\nthem:\n\n And down by the brimming intern\n I heard a lover sing\n Under an arch of the railway:\n \u201cLove has no ending\u2026\u201d\n\nAnd the deep intern ran on.\n\n*\n\nAll houses are a kind of tomb for daylight.\n\n*\n\nWhose tears will fuel this daylight tomb as it motors over paper.\n\n*\n\n\u201cSee how the embankment sprints into delphinium, son? Its name made it run away,\nand run that way.\u201d\n\n*\n\nAlways pitching forward and to the side, like a train emerging from its summer\nshell.\n\n*\n\nA rageful happiness overtook him, and he smiled at the officer.\n\n*\n\nMy shirt laughed at me.\n\n*\n\nSinging \u201cCan I Get a Witness\u201d to myself one evening as I passed a restaurant from\nwhich its final chorus spilled.\n\n*\n\nCarly\u2019s face hardened for a moment when I reminded her of when she had corrected\nan ugliness in my poem. Our train passed under the river. The other passengers read\nfrom their phones or sunk into their buds. The light was bad and warm. After a\nmoment of silence she replied, \u201cBut as friends we had a reason to talk that through.\u201d\n\nI\u2019m paraphrasing.\n\nWe hugged as I got off at Hoyt-Schermerhorn.\n\n*\n\nMan in Fort Greene with a tumescent, fatherly physique stretches his arm behind his\nhead and says into his phone, \u201cMy problem is I have a pretty tight window.\u201d\n\n*\n\nHe sucked his eyes beneath an undertow of scandal, one by one.\n\n*\n\nA fetish exists in the mind, but pleasure is in one\u2019s feet.\n\nMy metallic blue face surveyed the grass beneath them.\n\n*\n\nI like this aftermath even more than when we first met.\n\n*\n\n\u201cSomething was the end of that,\u201d he sang compliantly.\n\n*\n\nDispatching his lyrics into the maw of the three-headed melody.\n\n*\n\nShe\u2019d been accumulating choruses when the power cut out.\n\nShe, who had invented this instrument.\n\n*\n\nMy votes expressed in the forest now expressed on the avenues.\n\nMy votes the sparrows, my votes the rats, my votes the screen displaying train\narrival times.\n\nAmbiguity of question, clarity of answer.\n\n*\n\n\u201cWhat is\u201d walks away from \u201cis\u201d and slams the hatch shut behind it.\n\n*\n\nThe wheat levels its signal. My votes the wheat, my votes the water, my votes the\nlittle alphabet.\n\n*\n\nIgnorant water. Dumb little alphabet.\n\n*\n\nMy house\u2019s seal is leaking.\n\nI walked inside and played the roof\u2019s seal back to it in major scales.\n\nThis rubberized, tuneful roof.\n\n*\n\nA new genre of writing called \u201cBach\u201d inspired by proto-cubist breathing.\n\nThis breathing is the sound of someone being of two minds.\n\n*\n\nThe genre entered its password into my eyes, and there in the theater I wept freely.\n\nIf \u201cBach\u201d sounds cybernetic, the effects of its deeds upon the body tell a different\nstory.\n\n*\n\nLast night when I went to see the Goldberg Variations for the first time in a totally\neven-keeled mood I began spontaneously weeping. As if the notes were a password.\nIt is possible that the notes were telling me to mourn? My grandfather has recently\nbeen ill, and it doesn\u2019t look good\u2014but he\u2019s still alive. In music half of grief is\nretrospective, but half of it is speculative. Grief is so sci-fi.\n\n*\n\n\u201cMy house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defense against the rain.\u201d\n(Thoreau)\n\nI lay me down to greet the budding worms.\n\n*\n\nHalf the time I erased my comments from the feed. More rarely I sang what I had\njust erased into the blank Rolodex of evening. More rarely still, evening\u2019s contacts\nreturned my call.\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<\/pre>\n
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\nDaniel Poppick is the author of The Police<\/em> (Omnidawn, 2017) and Fear of Description<\/em> (Penguin, 2019), selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the National Poetry Series. His recent writing appears in BOMB, Kenyon Review<\/em>, the PEN Poetry Series, The Fanzine<\/em>, and at the Poetry Foundation. A recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, he currently lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a copywriter and co-edits the Catenary Press with Rob Schlegel and Rawaan Alkhatib.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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